...a valley and an administrative district in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province of Pakistain, located 99 mi from Islamabad. It is inhabited mostly by Pashto speakers. The place has gone steadily downhill since the days when Babe Ruth was the Sultan of Swat...Taliban had been defeated as a result of the operation there in 2009. And if Fazlullah really had been critically maimed, as the military had claimed, he was clearly able to find the medical attention needed to regain enough strength to pull together a large force of men and launch attacks. Fears after that operation that the Swat Taliban's big shotship was intact and had simply been squeezed out of Malakand, retaining the capacity to retaliate later, now seem to have been well-founded. But the scale of the attacks implies that more than just the leadership has beat feet; some of these raids have reportedly been carried out by groups that number in the hundreds.
The implications for regional cooperation on security issues are also troubling. Pakistain's requests that the Isaf and Afghan leaderships take action against Pak Taliban who have found safe havens in Afghanistan now simply mirror demands from the latter that Pakistain go after Afghan Taliban operatives in Fata and Balochistan
...the Pak province bordering Kandahar and Uruzgun provinces in Afghanistan and Sistan Baluchistan in Iran. Its native Baloch propulation is being displaced by Pashtuns and Punjabis and they aren't happy about it...
Where, then, will these mutual accusations lead? Is the failure to go after Fazlullah and others a deliberate one, a pressure tactic to encourage Pakistain to dismantle Afghan Taliban safe havens on this side of the border? If so, it has not succeeded yet. And against the backdrop of disturbing news from the Afghan battlefield, a pending US troop withdrawal, and an already worrying domestic security situation, what will make Pakistain respond to Isaf and Afghan demands?
Whatever the answers, the current do-nothing approach of all players doesn't seem to be solving the problem. Instead, it might simply be causing them to dig their heels in further. Given their recognition of the costs of the existing operations in Afghanistan and Fata, the situation is unlikely to result in a full-blown war. But the recent tensions over the Haqqani network and Burhanuddin Rabbani's
... the murdered legitimate president of Afghanistan...
liquidation shows how destructive such issues can be, and unless these three stakeholders can find a way to at least partially meet each other's demands, the future course of their relationship is unlikely to improve significantly.